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Insights on how we are assessing, modeling and monitoring the impact of COVID-19 on network infrastructure investment including a look at the evolving dynamics in mobile infrastructure and 5G deployments, fixed access, and IP/optical transport networks.

This market report provides data and analysis—worldwide and regional market size, vendor share, forecast, analysis, and trends—to help clients make better business decisions in the mobile and fixed line 5G data management software and services market.

Like many who have ties with the city and the region, I am deeply affected. As a child in the 1970s, La Costa Brava is where I spent my summer vacations immersed with local families, playing with the natives, which is how Castellano became my second language. Surprisingly, I never learned Catalan and only picked up English many years later.
Despite the circumstances, I made the trip to Barcelona to check the pulse of one of my favorite cities, which for the first time in 14 years, has not seen el congreso de carácter anual en torno al mundo de la comunicación móvil que se celebra en la Fira de Barcelona, España. Es considerado el más importante salón del mundo en su sector. In other words, Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the world’s biggest mobile event, and its cancellation has long and lasting consequences with losers and winners. And potentially, MWC as we know it is dead. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

2020 marks the start of a new year and a new decade, as well as the massive takeoff of 5G services worldwide. After more than a century, the telecommunications industry has accumulated numerous network elements that have increased operational complexity a great deal, affecting its competitiveness against web-scale companies such as Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Tencent. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft together spent about $83.4B in capex and capital leases for the 12-month period ended September 2019, which is close to total yearly telecom capex in North America. Web-scale companies have become notorious for spending billions every year to buy chips directly and design their own gear to power lean, agile business operations with no traditional OSS/BSS to worry about. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

Communications service providers (CSPs), telcos, telecommunication carrier innovation leaders, industry experts and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology gurus gathered again at this year’s Telco AI Summit Americas, an Informa event held near the San Francisco airport. The major theme of this small but focused event was to assess the state of the art of these disruptive technologies in the telco service provider space. The air quickly filled with agitated discussions around the telco’s increasing need for AI, especially with the coming 5G requirements, and the question of how operators can use AI to enhance their business and keep their customers happy. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

As usual this time of the year, I participated in Informa’s Telco AI Summit Americas, held in Brisbane, CA, a little-known town located at the southern border of my hometown of San Francisco, from December 3 to 4. But this time around, instead of chairing the whole event, I kicked off the first day with a keynote about state of the art of AI in the telco world. My piece centered on what I thought was the big November news in the telco world: the Linux Foundation’s third release of Acumos. It was only at the end of the day with the last presentation that I realized Google was already delivering a fully automated end-to-end telco network view, beside which Acumos pales as it remains solely focused on open radio access networks (O-RAN). But that’s a good start nevertheless. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

Semi-annually scheduled briefings with the analysts on research highlights from all aspects of the service enablement (OSS/BSS), analytics, AI (machine/deep learning), customer experience, revenue management, management and telecom APIs market.

This annual report provides accurate data and analysis—including market size, forecasts, and market trends—to help clients make better business decisions in the competitive landscape and growth areas of the convergent charging software and services market.

For the second year in a row, I made the trip to cowboy nation to attend Mavenir’s one-day analyst event in Dallas, Texas—and it was worth the trip. Last year at the same event, Mavenir exposed its virtual RAN (vRAN) strategy to a select group of respected telecom analysts, most of them veterans, and guess what? Despite the soundness of its vRAN baseband unit (BBU) architecture (Mavenir does not do remote radio units (RRUs), preferring to solely focus on software), no one believed the story—even less so when the rhetoric centered around taking on the big guys (e.g., Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia). Well, what a difference a year makes! Clients, please log in to view the full content.

The company announced its intent to acquire Centina. Announced on 3 October 2019 for an undisclosed amount, the deal is aimed at propelling Ciena’s Blue Planet division in the operational support systems (OSS) space. Which OSS space though? Ciena’s own OSS tools, the overcrowded OSS field, or a bit of both? Clients, please log in to view the full content.

Last week, I made the short trip up to San Francisco to immerse myself in the vibrant and fast-paced atmosphere of Oracle OpenWorld, where the brand’s refreshed look and feel was aimed at conveying one key theme: modern monetization. Warmer colors, new custom-designed font, and Asian-, African-, and Aboriginal-inspired art are transforming Oracle’s user experience across enterprise software applications and devices. From the Oracle Communications side of the company, there were good discussions emphasizing the role of the digital marketplace for communication service providers, with useful subscription-based data monetization customer cases. And we also learned that the Billing and Revenue Management (BRM), now available in cloud-native deployment, is a key pillar of modern monetization. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

On 30 May 2019, Telefónica de España selected Nokia’s Deepfield Cloud Intelligence analytics platform to improve user experience and troubleshoot content delivery in real time. With this tool, Telefónica expects to attain unprecedented real-time visibility into application and service traffic on its network with data-driven insight and analytics that can be turned into automated actions to significantly improve service assurance and performance. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

As usual for this time of the year, more than 3,000 people gathered in Nice, France, for the 30th TM Forum, also known as Digital Transformation World, the annual mecca for OSS/BSS. Because the show floor was reconfigured, it was difficult to evaluate the actual number of attendees to find out whether participation was higher than last year. One observation, however: we saw fewer service providers walking the aisles. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

For the past six years, I have never missed PERSPECTIVES, Ribbon Communications’ exclusive customer and partner event that brings marquee speakers like FCC CTO Eric Burger this year and Sir Ken Robinson four years ago. Every year is different, and this one was no exception. From the JW Marriott in LA Live last year, we moved to the JW Marriott DC on Pennsylvania Avenue for three full days (April 29 through May 1) of thought leadership content and top-notch entertainment, including a private event at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Clients, please log in to view the full content.

This market report provides accurate data and analyses—including market size, forecasts, and market trends—to help clients make better business decisions in the mobile and fixed line subscriber data management (SDM) software and services market.

With the world gearing up for a massive increase in IoT devices and the building of 5G networks, what we heard at Mobile World Congress this year is that OSS/BSS vendors are welcoming the new requirements with 5G-ready cloud platforms that facilitate service providers’ network virtualization process. Every service provider we’ve spoken with is involved in a network function virtualization project, and a few of them, including AT&T and Telefónica, are ahead of the process with large digital transformation initiatives. In fact, Telefónica organized a full session that dove into its ambitious transformation into a liquid software-defined automated network, where each network node is under consideration with a chief goal in mind: the move to 5G and future network architectures that revolve around convergence, simplification, disaggregation, virtualization, cloudification, automation, and infinite capacity. We can tell the vendors got the message, which can be summed up in five themes: cloud, 5G readiness, open source, collaboration and partnership, and digital BSS.

In January, Ericsson announced it is taking substantial measures to fix its struggling Business Support Systems (BSS) business, including the booking of provisions and restructuring charges of SEK -6.1 billion ($687 million) during Q4 2018. Ericsson has been pursuing a cost reduction and portfolio modernization strategy in an attempt to turn its Digital Services business into a profitable one, and it has reported some progress in the OSS and Cloud Core areas of the Digital Services portfolio—but none in the BSS area.